The Nazis had a very vague ideology other than blaming others for the problems and and advocating getting rid of them to fix the problems. Other fascist groups of the time had a more coherent viewpoint that made it easier to pin a right wing label on them.
When governments get too authoritarian the whole left/right wing labels don't fit so well. The politics can shift on a whim as necessary to keep the authority in power.
Well, it's the Breitbart era of news, just make up stories that appeal to the base, because only the hated elites would be so distrusting as to actually think about the news and look up the facts. Misdirection is alive and well.
But anyway... Does this make the ultra conservative neo Nazis the new-new-socialists and thus actually socialists? Or two the two "new"s cancel out the socialist part? Or maybe they were conservative all along ans the "socialist" is just misdirection...
The whole reason for the switcheroo is the lack of thinking. The world is comples and people want a black and white view of it that's easy to understand after having a few too many drinks at the bar. That means Hitler was the evilest guy ever, and the Nazis were the most evil group ever, and because liberals are evil (because the radio said so), liberals must really be Nazis. It makes sense when you drink instead of think.
Republicans are not outliers though. However the wing of the party that's managed to wrest control are the outliers. Most Republicans are still sane and moderate. The problem is that they get accused of being Democrats by the fringes. That's why the tea party Republicans were more angry with Boehner and Cantor than with any Democratic congress members. Right now the Republican party is dissolving itself, but before you go cheering, the Democratic party is set to do the same thing and for many of the same reasons.
The strangeness of the US election system means that we're stuck with essentially only two parties that will always be about evenly split down the middle. When half the country is Republican then they cannot be "outliers". The system means that the elections are controlled by the primaries, where the fringes compete against each other to see who is the craziest, so that in the general election you get crazy incumbent versus crazy opposition from the other party, all the campaigning is about appealing to the donors rather than appealing to the citizens.
We need 8 parties, so that the fringes can be pushed off to their own sandbox and the sane parties can find like minded alliances without necessary pledging undying loyalty to them. But we'll never have that with a winner-take-all system.
Generally, it's irrelevant. Politics should not be involved in education, so trying to figure out the demographics is counterproductive. Most college professors I knew never espoused any political ideology other than science (and sadly, science seems to bring out the politics of some).
What we don't need is the Fox News solution, which seems to be what's happening. Ie, some people get a gut feeling that news is secretly indoctrinating everyone to be liberal and in response they create an organization to overtly be indoctrinating fringe conservative views by replacing news with editorials. If they do that at colleges by replacing classes with overtly conservating indoctrination then it will be a very bad day (science 101: why evolution is a lie; science 102: why climate change is a commie plot; intro to white studies: how the confederacy will rise again).
Stop treating politics like it's just a fucking sports game people! Your team is not always right and the other team is not always wrong. Stop making it about the struggle between two extremist ideologies for control of the penant.
And this is the biggest reason to complain or protest when the US goes to war, rather than start waving the flags of patriotism. When the US invaded countries on the guise of stopping terrorism it sent a strong signal to authoritarian nations that they could crack down on their dissidents by claiming it was terrorism. The the weak minded step forward and say "if the US can do it, why can't our country do it?"
You mean Crimea which had a majority population of Tatars before Stalin shipped them off in train cars to move in Russian loyalists?
Stop with the nationalist bullshit. Ethnicity is becoming irrelevant, people should not be going to wars over something so trivial. If Russians are living in Ukraine, then so what? Let them learn to speak Ukrainian, the Russians are the newcomers after all. Why emulate Hitler in deciding that it's ok to invade a country just because some of the people there speak the same language you do?
The soviet union has disbanded. Stop trying to rebuild it by replacing the apparatchiks with organized crime syndicates.
Then they're making their money in some other way - the 2% transaction fee, or enough interest rate that it's affordable to also keep customers who don't pay interest, or yearly fees.
Ads on slashdot? Never see them. Let my fire up my adblock/noscript free browser instance and see what Slashdot really looks like. Just a few seconds here... Nope. Not seeing it. There's a small two line long advert at the top in beige and no images., it's no thicker than the normal headline+post details. There is all the stuff on the left but it's not hiding any text, and the majority vanished once I logged in.
Fraud can and often is paid for by the banks. It's easier for the big credit card companies to pull money out of the banks than out of the small business owners. This depends upon the contract between the banks and the credit card companies (remember, there are usually four parties involved in each credit card transaction).
If the merchants have to pick up the tab here they are often put out of business (you get a black mark and you won't be able to find other credit card processing services and have to go cash only which makes it very hard to stay in business). If the merchant is being careful doing things right then it's bad business for the credit card company to demand 100% of reimbursemen, because you lose a good customer.
That's because the infrastructure isn't really there. Chip system in europe are very fast. Financial transactions like to be fast, which is why in a lot of cases there are shortcuts. Older ATM cards used to have the PIN stored on the magnetic stripe in order to reduce transaction time versus coordinating with the back office, with the assumption that the average consumer didn't have the capability of reading/writing these cards. Over time this assumption was proven wrong so now they don't do it the same way.
The mag strip system is faster for credit cards for a few reasons. The new chips may not be the fastest processors (they were rushed out essentially). I know of some smart card systems that are java engines running on top of 8-bit 8051... And the transaction is back and forth with the chip so it has to stay inserted in the machine for a few seconds, whereas with the mag stripe once you have the credit card number retrieved you can put the card back in the wallet. The request to see if the credit card number is valid and the account is in good standing is very fast, the whole system was set up to streamline this. For chip system the transaction has to include the amount of the purchase so it can't even being to start processing until the total is known, and it has some handshaking involved. The system isn't set up yet to make this fast, all the existing infrastructure assumes credit card number only. And just like credit cards there are milions of these requests coming in and if the chip systems are shunted off to just a few machines then that adds to the delay. And believe me, a lot of those stores are not using high speed internet for this, many still have dialup for the authorization.
A lot of businesses do have the discount, and in the past this was quite common. Today though there's a trend to charge the same price whether or not you use a credit card or pay cash. The only places I still see this is with gas stations.
The difference is that Visa/Mastercard are not just alternatives to cash, they are instead convenient access to lines of credit combined with a payment system. Credit comes with its own drabacks. A true cash alternative should come without the credit part, but to also be a viable alternative it should not be more risky or more inconvenient than cash.
It depends on the financial services. Credit cards want the transaction fees. If there are no transaction fees then they must be making money some other way (interest to the customers, selling data, magic pixie dust). No one supplies the credit for free.
And who the hell uses those other than hipsters? if they're not getting a cut of fees then they're selling your purchasing data. NO ONE does this as a charity!
This includes the US. While it may seem super easy to get a credit card, especially if one shows up pre-approved in your dog's name, it's still somewhat difficult to get poorer people. If you get bad credit temporarily then that can disqualify you for years until the credit score goes back up. And the fees may be so high on some cards that they're unaffordable (and some cards are very predatory). Finally there are people who literally have no bank account, and every transaction they make is with cash, which is why there's actually a big business in check cashing services (also highly predatory).
It's no surprise why Visa is doing this. It is not for the betterment of society, it's so that they can get more of that 2% cut.
No fee for me to use my bank's ATM. And yes, one of the key factors way back when I chose them was how many of their ATMs were available versus needing to use a competitor's ATMs. I basically take out $200 at a time and it lasts me quite awhile.
I have free lunch so I don't use as much cash during the week, but I remember being in lines at subway or delis and whenever there was someone trying to use a credit card it always slowed things down; or worse trying to pay with their phone while the hipster operating the lunch truck is waiting for the acknowledgement to come through.
Chicken pox is not a concern for children. No one had a vaccine for it when I was a kid and everyone caught it and it was sort of normal. Chicken pox is mostly a concern for adults where the symptoms are much worse.
When people mention vaccines and how they help children, it's about the SERIOUS diseases! Ie, measles can be fatal. Bringing up the minor stuff just puts you into the anti-vaxx hysteria camp.
My health plan is Kaiser Permanente, and every time I visit I get a list of upcoming vaccine dates and such. Since they're both a medical provider and medical plan, they have a vested interest in keeping customers healthy so that they can keep more of their money. They're also very good at signing patients up to classes, like how to manage asthma, diabetes, what to do if you're having a baby, and so forth.
Cash is also a good limit on your spending. If I only have $10 left, I will not be buying that expensive lunch, I'll put the souvenir back on the shelf, etc. Having to run to the ATM to get money does keep one frugal. Still a serious problem in the US are younger people who quickly get into credit card debt, despite just about every school trying to teach financial responsibility in civics classes. It keeps the repo guys in business I guess.
I saw this in the last 90s. A computer store in an outage. They had 3 people at one checkout line. One to be the main cashier, one to read a manual, and one to figure out how the calculator worked.
NATO existed before the Warsaw Pact. The USSR may have been seen as the major threat, but the charter doesn't mention them. The charter does claim to be about stability and well beaing of the north atlantic area.
And after the cold war there was the CFE treaty to reduce overall militarization on the continent, though both sides were accused to have been violating this after time, but it did lead to the overall reduction in spending on NATO (something Trump doesn't seem happy with).
Chechens won their first war, and the war ended. It should have stayed that way except that Putin invaded only a few short months after becoming PM which propelled him to the presidency. The "reason" was Chechen terrorists but that is sometimes in dispute (the Chechens won the war, why would the want to start it up again?).
The Wg the Dog in Serbia was part of a NATO action, which the US is a member of and so far the primary dues payer. I don't necessarily agree with that bombing, but saying that the US shoul ignore NATO until there's an "anti American" action is dumb. NATO is expanding because so many smaller countries that feel defenseless against the Russian bully want to be in the alliance. Never mind that many of those smaller countries used to be subjugated by the USSR, and Russia before then.
Sure, the US invades a lot of places it should not, I agree with that. But Putin is not any better and he certainly holds the moral low ground.
This is B.S. A gift is a gift first off, you can't just turn around and say "oops, I didn't realize the gift I gave you was worth so much!" Second, it is primarily Russian because of Russian military bases. Historically it has not been a Russian region, the Tatars have a stronger claim than either Russia or Ukraine, although they were forcibly removed by USSR after WWII ended.
Russia rolled into Ukraine against all international laws and norms. It's exactly what Hitler did in the Sudatenland, to "protect" a German speaking region. Except that ironically Russia was the one accusing Ukraine of being full of nazis (it's their go-to insult). The election in the Crimea was pure bullshit and had no legitimacy.
Russia really moved in because the Ukraine got rid of it's pro-Putin president and got a pro-western president. Putin hated the Orange revolution as he feels all former Russian or Soviet regions belong to him, and he treats it as an insult when they reject their former overlords.
The US doesn't drop this because Ukraine is our ally, and Russia is not.
Slashdot Mirror
The Nazis had a very vague ideology other than blaming others for the problems and and advocating getting rid of them to fix the problems. Other fascist groups of the time had a more coherent viewpoint that made it easier to pin a right wing label on them.
When governments get too authoritarian the whole left/right wing labels don't fit so well. The politics can shift on a whim as necessary to keep the authority in power.
Well, it's the Breitbart era of news, just make up stories that appeal to the base, because only the hated elites would be so distrusting as to actually think about the news and look up the facts. Misdirection is alive and well.
But anyway... Does this make the ultra conservative neo Nazis the new-new-socialists and thus actually socialists? Or two the two "new"s cancel out the socialist part? Or maybe they were conservative all along ans the "socialist" is just misdirection...
The whole reason for the switcheroo is the lack of thinking. The world is comples and people want a black and white view of it that's easy to understand after having a few too many drinks at the bar. That means Hitler was the evilest guy ever, and the Nazis were the most evil group ever, and because liberals are evil (because the radio said so), liberals must really be Nazis. It makes sense when you drink instead of think.
Republicans are not outliers though. However the wing of the party that's managed to wrest control are the outliers. Most Republicans are still sane and moderate. The problem is that they get accused of being Democrats by the fringes. That's why the tea party Republicans were more angry with Boehner and Cantor than with any Democratic congress members. Right now the Republican party is dissolving itself, but before you go cheering, the Democratic party is set to do the same thing and for many of the same reasons.
The strangeness of the US election system means that we're stuck with essentially only two parties that will always be about evenly split down the middle. When half the country is Republican then they cannot be "outliers". The system means that the elections are controlled by the primaries, where the fringes compete against each other to see who is the craziest, so that in the general election you get crazy incumbent versus crazy opposition from the other party, all the campaigning is about appealing to the donors rather than appealing to the citizens.
We need 8 parties, so that the fringes can be pushed off to their own sandbox and the sane parties can find like minded alliances without necessary pledging undying loyalty to them. But we'll never have that with a winner-take-all system.
Generally, it's irrelevant. Politics should not be involved in education, so trying to figure out the demographics is counterproductive. Most college professors I knew never espoused any political ideology other than science (and sadly, science seems to bring out the politics of some).
What we don't need is the Fox News solution, which seems to be what's happening. Ie, some people get a gut feeling that news is secretly indoctrinating everyone to be liberal and in response they create an organization to overtly be indoctrinating fringe conservative views by replacing news with editorials. If they do that at colleges by replacing classes with overtly conservating indoctrination then it will be a very bad day (science 101: why evolution is a lie; science 102: why climate change is a commie plot; intro to white studies: how the confederacy will rise again).
Stop treating politics like it's just a fucking sports game people! Your team is not always right and the other team is not always wrong. Stop making it about the struggle between two extremist ideologies for control of the penant.
And this is the biggest reason to complain or protest when the US goes to war, rather than start waving the flags of patriotism. When the US invaded countries on the guise of stopping terrorism it sent a strong signal to authoritarian nations that they could crack down on their dissidents by claiming it was terrorism. The the weak minded step forward and say "if the US can do it, why can't our country do it?"
You mean Crimea which had a majority population of Tatars before Stalin shipped them off in train cars to move in Russian loyalists?
Stop with the nationalist bullshit. Ethnicity is becoming irrelevant, people should not be going to wars over something so trivial. If Russians are living in Ukraine, then so what? Let them learn to speak Ukrainian, the Russians are the newcomers after all. Why emulate Hitler in deciding that it's ok to invade a country just because some of the people there speak the same language you do?
The soviet union has disbanded. Stop trying to rebuild it by replacing the apparatchiks with organized crime syndicates.
If he actually watches the news. Often he's watching some conspiracy outlet disguised as news.
Then they're making their money in some other way - the 2% transaction fee, or enough interest rate that it's affordable to also keep customers who don't pay interest, or yearly fees.
Ads on slashdot? Never see them. Let my fire up my adblock/noscript free browser instance and see what Slashdot really looks like. Just a few seconds here...
Nope. Not seeing it. There's a small two line long advert at the top in beige and no images., it's no thicker than the normal headline+post details. There is all the stuff on the left but it's not hiding any text, and the majority vanished once I logged in.
Fraud can and often is paid for by the banks. It's easier for the big credit card companies to pull money out of the banks than out of the small business owners. This depends upon the contract between the banks and the credit card companies (remember, there are usually four parties involved in each credit card transaction).
If the merchants have to pick up the tab here they are often put out of business (you get a black mark and you won't be able to find other credit card processing services and have to go cash only which makes it very hard to stay in business). If the merchant is being careful doing things right then it's bad business for the credit card company to demand 100% of reimbursemen, because you lose a good customer.
That's because the infrastructure isn't really there. Chip system in europe are very fast. Financial transactions like to be fast, which is why in a lot of cases there are shortcuts. Older ATM cards used to have the PIN stored on the magnetic stripe in order to reduce transaction time versus coordinating with the back office, with the assumption that the average consumer didn't have the capability of reading/writing these cards. Over time this assumption was proven wrong so now they don't do it the same way.
The mag strip system is faster for credit cards for a few reasons. The new chips may not be the fastest processors (they were rushed out essentially). I know of some smart card systems that are java engines running on top of 8-bit 8051... And the transaction is back and forth with the chip so it has to stay inserted in the machine for a few seconds, whereas with the mag stripe once you have the credit card number retrieved you can put the card back in the wallet. The request to see if the credit card number is valid and the account is in good standing is very fast, the whole system was set up to streamline this. For chip system the transaction has to include the amount of the purchase so it can't even being to start processing until the total is known, and it has some handshaking involved. The system isn't set up yet to make this fast, all the existing infrastructure assumes credit card number only. And just like credit cards there are milions of these requests coming in and if the chip systems are shunted off to just a few machines then that adds to the delay. And believe me, a lot of those stores are not using high speed internet for this, many still have dialup for the authorization.
A lot of businesses do have the discount, and in the past this was quite common. Today though there's a trend to charge the same price whether or not you use a credit card or pay cash. The only places I still see this is with gas stations.
The difference is that Visa/Mastercard are not just alternatives to cash, they are instead convenient access to lines of credit combined with a payment system. Credit comes with its own drabacks. A true cash alternative should come without the credit part, but to also be a viable alternative it should not be more risky or more inconvenient than cash.
It depends on the financial services. Credit cards want the transaction fees. If there are no transaction fees then they must be making money some other way (interest to the customers, selling data, magic pixie dust). No one supplies the credit for free.
And who the hell uses those other than hipsters? if they're not getting a cut of fees then they're selling your purchasing data. NO ONE does this as a charity!
This includes the US. While it may seem super easy to get a credit card, especially if one shows up pre-approved in your dog's name, it's still somewhat difficult to get poorer people. If you get bad credit temporarily then that can disqualify you for years until the credit score goes back up. And the fees may be so high on some cards that they're unaffordable (and some cards are very predatory). Finally there are people who literally have no bank account, and every transaction they make is with cash, which is why there's actually a big business in check cashing services (also highly predatory).
It's no surprise why Visa is doing this. It is not for the betterment of society, it's so that they can get more of that 2% cut.
No fee for me to use my bank's ATM. And yes, one of the key factors way back when I chose them was how many of their ATMs were available versus needing to use a competitor's ATMs. I basically take out $200 at a time and it lasts me quite awhile.
I have free lunch so I don't use as much cash during the week, but I remember being in lines at subway or delis and whenever there was someone trying to use a credit card it always slowed things down; or worse trying to pay with their phone while the hipster operating the lunch truck is waiting for the acknowledgement to come through.
Chicken pox is not a concern for children. No one had a vaccine for it when I was a kid and everyone caught it and it was sort of normal. Chicken pox is mostly a concern for adults where the symptoms are much worse.
When people mention vaccines and how they help children, it's about the SERIOUS diseases! Ie, measles can be fatal. Bringing up the minor stuff just puts you into the anti-vaxx hysteria camp.
My health plan is Kaiser Permanente, and every time I visit I get a list of upcoming vaccine dates and such. Since they're both a medical provider and medical plan, they have a vested interest in keeping customers healthy so that they can keep more of their money. They're also very good at signing patients up to classes, like how to manage asthma, diabetes, what to do if you're having a baby, and so forth.
Cash is also a good limit on your spending. If I only have $10 left, I will not be buying that expensive lunch, I'll put the souvenir back on the shelf, etc. Having to run to the ATM to get money does keep one frugal. Still a serious problem in the US are younger people who quickly get into credit card debt, despite just about every school trying to teach financial responsibility in civics classes. It keeps the repo guys in business I guess.
Don't know what society you're in, but they still take cash in my society.
I saw this in the last 90s. A computer store in an outage. They had 3 people at one checkout line. One to be the main cashier, one to read a manual, and one to figure out how the calculator worked.
NATO existed before the Warsaw Pact. The USSR may have been seen as the major threat, but the charter doesn't mention them. The charter does claim to be about stability and well beaing of the north atlantic area.
And after the cold war there was the CFE treaty to reduce overall militarization on the continent, though both sides were accused to have been violating this after time, but it did lead to the overall reduction in spending on NATO (something Trump doesn't seem happy with).
Chechens won their first war, and the war ended. It should have stayed that way except that Putin invaded only a few short months after becoming PM which propelled him to the presidency. The "reason" was Chechen terrorists but that is sometimes in dispute (the Chechens won the war, why would the want to start it up again?).
The Wg the Dog in Serbia was part of a NATO action, which the US is a member of and so far the primary dues payer. I don't necessarily agree with that bombing, but saying that the US shoul ignore NATO until there's an "anti American" action is dumb. NATO is expanding because so many smaller countries that feel defenseless against the Russian bully want to be in the alliance. Never mind that many of those smaller countries used to be subjugated by the USSR, and Russia before then.
Sure, the US invades a lot of places it should not, I agree with that. But Putin is not any better and he certainly holds the moral low ground.
This is B.S. A gift is a gift first off, you can't just turn around and say "oops, I didn't realize the gift I gave you was worth so much!" Second, it is primarily Russian because of Russian military bases. Historically it has not been a Russian region, the Tatars have a stronger claim than either Russia or Ukraine, although they were forcibly removed by USSR after WWII ended.
Russia rolled into Ukraine against all international laws and norms. It's exactly what Hitler did in the Sudatenland, to "protect" a German speaking region. Except that ironically Russia was the one accusing Ukraine of being full of nazis (it's their go-to insult). The election in the Crimea was pure bullshit and had no legitimacy.
Russia really moved in because the Ukraine got rid of it's pro-Putin president and got a pro-western president. Putin hated the Orange revolution as he feels all former Russian or Soviet regions belong to him, and he treats it as an insult when they reject their former overlords.
The US doesn't drop this because Ukraine is our ally, and Russia is not.